Web-fed printing presses print on continuous webs of paper supplied in rolls. Roll fed printing presses are used wherever speed is important. This requirement applies to newspapers, magazines, and many other type of commercially printed products. In the production of the above items, speed is of the utmost importance. Many ancillary services depend on this speed.
One concern in such printing plants is the continuous feed of paper into the printing press. Printing presses which are operating at extremely high speeds and that they use up paper at a very high rate. When a roll of paper such as newsprint is about to expire, it is therefore of compelling importance that a new roll be fed into the press without slowing the press and without any interruption or break in the stream of paper. If, for example, a new roll is improperly introduced to the press so that the press must be shut down to correct the error, all of the concomitant problems that go with this delay come into play. Consequently, a continuous feed of paper to supply these large high speed presses is of paramount importance.
In the past, it has been conventional to introduce a new roll of newsprint into a press on the expiration or almost expiration of the preceding roll. This has been done by making splices between the rolls so that the new roll feeds into the press on the expiration of the old roll. When these rolls are rotating at tremendously high speeds, effecting of a splice between the rolls is extremely difficult.
In order to effect the splice between an expiring and a new roll at high rotational speeds, it has been customary to use a paster or a paster pattern. There have been numerous paster patterns used for this purpose, see for example, Rosen U.S. Pat. No. 2,377,971; Melache U.S. Pat. No. 2,812,145; Francik U.S. Pat. No. 3,001,735; Phipps U.S. Pat. No. 3,231,949; Baker U.S. Pat. No. 3,724,033 and Underwood U.S. Pat. No. 3,787,264.
It has also been conventional for journeymen printers in the news printing business to construct their own patterns by applying glue to the surface of a new roll in various forms to effect the splice.
All of these prior art devices and customs have been only partially effective and none have solved the problem of providing a satisfactory splice on a reliable basis. Unofficial statistics have indicated that over the past two decades or so, the efficiency of roll splicing has been somewhere in the vicinity of 98%. That means that 2% of the time, the splice is not effective, the press must be shut down and all of the delays heretofore described arise. The loss of time and money involved in these situations is such that getting as close as one can to a 100% sure splicing method is of great importance.